Raise your hand if you’re using Citrix Cloud services

Citrix has been proactively marketing cloud services for about two years, but why is the adoption rate low?

Full adoption of Citrix Cloud services is in the scant single digits. Despite Citrix’s “cloud-first” approach, the customer base hasn’t fully embraced it. In this article, we’ll review the Citrix Cloud services offerings related to XenApp/XenDesktop, as well as the present and potential future state of cloud adoption.

First, there are “Service” offerings, which allow you to run workloads on various hypervisors and cloud platforms. XenDesktop Service was launched in 2015, and XenApp Service became available as a standalone offering earlier this year.

XenDesktop Essentials: Virtual desktop service based on each user having a unique corresponding Windows 10 desktop (i.e. 1:1). Cost is $12/user/month and auto-renewed monthly.

The following is applicable to all offerings:

Core components, i.e. Delivery Controller, Director, Studio, Licensing Server, StoreFront (now called Workspace Experience), as well as the required component databases, are included. The control plane component features vary based on the offering.

A minimum of 25 users per month is required.

NetScaler Gateway is included for secure remote access.

Workloads, i.e. server or workstation VMs, storage, and all other resources, such as database servers, are not

A bit confusing, yes!

Survey says …

In the eG Innovations/DABCC 2018 Citrix Migration Survey, conducted in late 2017 (awesome report!), only 5% of the respondents reported that they were currently using Citrix Cloud (i.e. XenApp/XenDesktop Service) or XenApp/XenDesktop Essentials, and 50% had no plans for cloud adoption. The remainder were considering cloud services or planning to look at moving to the cloud in the future.

While the cloud adoption rate may have increased slightly since the survey date, it’s clear that a major shift has not yet occurred. There are several key reasons for this. The survey identified a few--including lack of familiarity, cost, and security/compliance--plus there are others that I’ll mention.

Education process: Cloud is completely new way to manage a virtualization infrastructure, and it is initially overwhelming. In addition, the cost for a cloud lab environment may be prohibitive. While some training materials and labs exist, it’s just not as well-known as the traditional method of installing a few VMs and voilà.

Cost: Especially for those with extreme database and storage requirements, moving workloads to the cloud comes with a high cost. Many enterprises underestimate the cost associated with the various aspects of cloud services.

Compliance: Many highly regulated industries, such as banking and health care, have detailed and complex compliance requirements. Audit and documentation specifications don’t readily embrace new technologies, and early cloud adopters may be subject to additional scrutiny.

Lack of per-user/per-month pricing: Unlike Azure, AWS, and other providers that invoice based on actual monthly usage, Citrix licensing is stringently based on a minimum of 25 users and, for the “Service” offerings, at least one year.

Cloud keeps changing: It’s both a positive and a negative that cloud interfaces and functionality are continuously modified. As a result, the people maintaining cloud resources and workloads must constantly stay abreast of changes, and this may require allocating redundant and expensive IT professionals for administration.

What if? Citrix administrators are accustomed with how to manage on-premises environments, but may fear being ill-equipped to address numerous “what if?” scenarios that may arise in the cloud, i.e., you don’t know what you don’t know. A savvy consultant can help guide you through this new territory.

Drivers for cloud migration

On the positive side, there are some significant factors that will drive cloud migration in 2018. As the survey states, XenApp 6.5 end of life is a key reason to consider Citrix Cloud offerings, but there are several other effects that will accelerate adoption this year.

XenApp 6.5 end of life: With end of life only two months away, many organizations are scrambling to add extended support while making plans to adopt XenApp 7.x. Because the environment must largely be rebuilt in order to simultaneously adopt a newer version of Windows Server, considering making all of these changes in the cloud has merit. Demand for consulting will likely be at an all-time high from Citrix customers as they deliberate XenApp 7.x and associated infrastructure options.

Getting out of the data center business: Many CIOs have openly stated this as a goal. Even though moving to the cloud represents a higher cost, the current “rack ‘em, stack ‘em” efforts associated with maintaining a data center detract from the desired focus of some IT organizations.

Built-in core component redundancy and upgrades: Citrix Cloud provides inherent redundancy and upgrades of the core components. IT shops that have experienced significant downtime due to single points of failure and complexity associated with upgrades can appreciate this built-in functionality.

NetScaler simplification: Let’s face it: NetScaler is a fairly complex piece of the Citrix infrastructure, and NetScaler administrators are difficult to find and retain. Allowing Citrix to take responsibility for secure remote access as part of Citrix Cloud may be the icing on the cake for some enterprises.

Wrap-up

Although actual cloud adoption is minimal to date, many IT organizations are pondering next steps for XenApp 6.5 environments, and the result will likely be more Citrix Cloud adoption near term. For some, on-premises solutions will prevail, but as part of due diligence, many organizations will at least take a look at Citrix Cloud to determine whether it’s the better option.

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Not quite. When hypervisors first came out, adoption was very low. Admins had all kinds of fears, but use of hypervisors and VMs became the norm. Same with Citrix Cloud. Adoption has been low to date, and EOL for XA6.5 will likely create a surge in interest.

I was inches from pulling the trigger moving my "control-plane" to Citrix Cloud for vdi workloads, however I still have really old thin clients that rely on pnagent services on my storefront which is not supported with their SF cloud. The version of Receiver they are on can't be upgraded. I'll budget those replacements for next year (I'm leaning towards nComputing RPi3's). Once that is complete, then I'm all in. I don't want to have to worry about SQL, SF, upgrades, etc, etc. VM's will stay onsite close to their sql apps and such, and let them deal with load balancers, Netscalers and all that other stuff. The cost increase was negligible. If more admins understood this, I think they would be onboard as well, but most people feel moving to the cloud will render themselves un-employed or whatever.

I'd recommend that you don't bet too heavily on the future of Citrix Cloud. Citrix has a history of pulling the plug on their unsuccessful SMB products.

To be honest, I'm surprised that Citrix Cloud gets even 5% of Citrix revenue. It's an astonishingly expensive, niche product with a very limited market. It feels like a product that a small startup would create (Workspot?).

Here's a few other reasons customers should be careful of Citrix Cloud Services

They still only offer SLGoals for some services (XA/XD service). An SLA has to be agreed on a 1:1 basis through a custom agreement, painful, slow and costly: https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-cloud/xenapp-and-xendesktop-service.html#service-level-goal

Studio through XE/XD service is sooo slooooow, legacy MMC takes forever to load from either control plane (US EAST, EMEA). imagine having to deal with that every day as an admin

Concurrent licensing for XA/XD service only applies to Net new customer who go with premium service, ummm did someone day £1210 per user per year ($100)?! Excluding the infrastructure (VDA's and Cloud Connectors to host!)

Citrix have no consistant backup methodology in place for your Cloud services, ask them to do a restore and see what happens!

The architecture for XA/XD service is mostly hosted on one VM, Studio, Director, licensing and DDC all on one VM. Yes one VM. Whatever happened to best practice huh?

MCS, PVS and the Netscaler still need to be on premise because there is no full native offering that will provide you with everything you need in the cloud

oh and lastly, Citrix cannot provide you with a TCO model to prove their cloud offering is cheaper than on-premises

You may see some big Citrix Cloud Services numbers when it comes to marketing, note that these are actually ShareFile customers, but Citrix like to wrap it up as Citrix Cloud Services. Think you will find they have sub 1k customer globally, including essentials.

The article correctly stated: "Citrix
licensing is stringently based on a minimum of 25 users and, for the
“Service” offerings, at least one year." Also, it was identified that Essentials auto-renews monthly.

Trying to be a Citrix Cloud customer but Citrix making it quite hard. In the Studio Published App we get a 'You need to allow cookies' error when authenticating to Azure when creating the hosting resource. Nothing to do with my browser, 100% to do with the Citrix-hosted service. Bad experience so far. Citrix needs to invest in creating a native HTML replacement for Studio.